Commentary

Driving a golf cart to the parking lot to transfer clubs to our cars recently, I noticed that my golfing cart partner had a new car, a beautiful cherry-red Lexus SUV.  He shared that while he and his wife decided to downsize, needing only one car, he couldn’t bring himself to go electric.

Another golfing buddy of mine has an electric car that he’s delighted with, using it to drive locally, to the golf course and shopping, but he also owns a combustion engine SUV.

Those of you who are regular readers may recall where I stand on the Biden administration’s aggressive push for Americans to purchase an electric vehicle, to the extent that they are providing $7,500 credits when you purchase one.  As if that wasn’t incentive enough, he’s spending billions of taxpayer funds to install thousands of charging stations along the nation’s highways.

I understand that electric vehicles now make up about 10 percent of the vehicles on the road.  Biden visualizes an all-electric car country by 2050.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Allysia Finley, she notes that more will be expected of us, according to a report from the University of California, Davis, that outlines sacrifices that will be needed to meet the left’s net-zero climate goals.

Didn’t they hear climate czar John Kerry’s remark on January 17, 2021 that reducing to net-zero won’t make much of a difference in the global climate fight?

The UC Davis report has identified another problem of concern to  environmentalists.  Getting people out of fossil fuel cars and into electric cars isn’t enough.  They want to see a decreasing car ownership.

They want us to make do with much less – fewer cars, smaller houses, different eating habits and other measures resulting in a significantly lower standard of living. And, they want us to consume less energy.

There’s more. Those same radical environmentalists who demanded we get off fossil fuels and go electric, are now waking up to a new concern brought about with that fantasy, the report notes.

You’ve read about it here before.  It’s the requirement for massive amounts of minerals – lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel – required in the making of those vehicle batteries, which have to be extracted from the ground like fossil fuels.

Unlike fossil fuels that we are able to cleanly remove from our vast underground supplies, extracting those minerals requires huge mining operations mostly found in undeveloped areas.

It has finally dawned on those environmentalists that not only will the mining do social and environmental harm to the indigenous people in those countries, they’ve learned that mining requires energy and water and the process of refining minerals will require even more.  They not only see what mining will do to the land, but realize it will increase CO2 emissions.

In the letter’s column of the Journal, I noticed an exchange with two individuals over mining in the U.S.  A St. Paul resident was opposed to extracting copper from northwestern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters.

A writer from Indianapolis asks “Where will the minerals come from that are needed to create a massive increase in the production of solar panels, wind farms and electric cars,” noting that if mining here can’t be done in an ecologically sound manner, what is the ecological and human cost we will impose on another country?

The handwriting is on the wall. EV car prices will increase due to the shortage and demand for materials, and Americans won’t be able to afford them even with a tax credit.

First, they wanted prices at the pump to increase so high that it would drive people to electric cars.  Now they see their ultimate goal of eliminating cars on the road is within reach.

I see it as a perfect storm.  In his State of the Union address, President Biden brazenly said, “we’re still going to need oil and gas for a while.” He has convinced auto manufacturers to invest in the production of electric vehicles with a promise to provide incentives to buyers.

However, now the government and the manufacturers are not only facing those picky environmentalists, who do not want the land disturbed, and Americans who want to see our dependence on China curtailed.

The rare minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries extend to solar panels and wind turbines, where there is a concern that there won’t be the sufficient amounts required for the massive batteries that will be needed to store energy when there’s no wind or sunshine.

Accountability for the energy crisis we are now experiencing clearly lies with President Biden’s personal vendetta against President Trump, whose policies gave us energy independence.

Developing wind and solar alternatives while enjoying the abundance of fossil fuels would have been logical, but we have found Biden to be unfamiliar with logic and common sense so far.

Who would have thunk that environmentalists might save us from Biden’s energy fantasy?

May God continue to bless the United States of America.